Many years ago, some friends of mine started doing their own zine sized comic anthology. The concept they had wasn’t groundbreaking- they all did comics, and they had friends who all did comics, so they thought would collect some of the best ones and put it out every few months. One of the things we all did back then was to chat up other comic creators and try and get people to kick in pages for the book. As I remember it, the two major rules were A) Every comic had to be a maximum of 6 pages and B) Every comic had to be a stand-alone story.

While a handful of people bitched about the first rule, after a while it became clear that just about EVERYONE complained about the second. Each time, the complaint was the same almost word-for-word, as if creators were passing around cue cards to each other and reading from a script.

“I can’t give you a story that ENDS,” they would all say, “because I have plotted out [blah-blah-biddy-blah] issues of story already and this is just a PART of that…”

When you would question people, they would all kick out examples like Dave Sim or Jeff Smith and say that THOSE guys were doing very long, involved stories that took X number of issues to tell…

To you, reader looking to Fail in Indy comics, I will say the same thing I had to say to every one of those people who gave me what we came to call the “Dave Sim” Argument:

“You are NOT [insert favorite cuss word here] Dave Sim! You are never going to BE Dave [Cuss word of your choice] Sim! And you need to get over that right now!”

Our Failure lesson for today is simple to explain but hard for today’s comic fan to reconcile, and that is: Goals are only good if you complete them. That’s right- nobody cares if you aimed for the moon when you never even passed the entry physical as an astronaut! No girl says to herself about a perspective boyfriend, “Well, WANTING to move out of his mother’s basement and get a job rather than eating Ding Dongs and reading comics all day is KIND of like doing it…” I know that Marvel and DC and even Image of late have been doing company wide crossovers and long, involved mega-storylines. I know they plan out their whole “Universe” and fill it with a non-stop parade of characters that would threaten to cripple the US Census if they tried to count them all. And yes, I know that people seem to love all that.

BUT… You are not DC or Marvel. Or even Image. And even if you were, you need to think back to how DC and Marvel became DC and Marvel. They didn’t START with trying to build some “Universe” and fill it with 50,000 characters, all with impossible to remember interlocking histories. They wrote stories- mostly short stories, in fact. And most of those stories only really dealt with a handful of characters at one time. AND… they were (for the most part) wrapped up by the end of an issue, with many books having 2 or 3 stories PER issue. And for decades, that was not only the norm, it was how comic fans wanted it!

Next time you are in your local comic store, go over to where the Trades are being sold, and look at the paperback collections that DC and Marvel are putting out of their Silver Age material. You’ll notice a few things- the stories are almost all shorter than standard 22 page length, they focus on a handful of characters at best, and they are actually FUN to read! Amazing!

Without giving an extensive history lesson, here is what happened- Marvel and DC started off as, for lack of a better term, “Indy” companies. They put out comics featuring characters they thought people might like, and built supporting casts a little at a time, adding characters as needed to tell a story.

Think of Superman, for example- he needed a family to tell his origin, so his parents had to be written in. He needed co-workers for his day job, so they were added. After a while, it became clear that Superman couldn’t just foil bank robbers and common thieves, so they added more powerful villains. Those villains needed people to interact with, so they were given “side kicks” and such… Everything grew out of telling short, complete stories that people wanted to read. Teaming up 2 or more heroes came much later, when several heroes had books out and had developed fan bases and readers started to ask why Superman never worked with Batman, or why you never saw Captain America and the Human Torch fighting together…

What it boils down to is that DC and Marvel can do massive stories because they took the time years ago to develop characters that people care about through self contained stories. Even Dave Sim started his Cerebus run as a book that was relatively self contained. Yes, he raised his hand one day and said he was going to do 300 issues… but he started that run with small stories and built up from there.

And, yes, Jeff Smith did a long story in Bone, but one that followed a small number of main characters. And, oh- Jeff Smith is Uber Talented & committed YEARS of his life to doing nothing but that one story, not to mention that he had the entire core of the story completed before he started his re-worked version that he released through Cartoon Books…

Yes- completed! Jeff Smith actually did Bone twice. The book we all know & love was actually his second go-round with the story. If you are committed to actually finish a whole mega-story, then go back to page 1 and revise, re-write and re-draw the whole thing with the intent of making it better, then you can take a shot at putting out the next Bone.

Now, all the “facts” and “information” and “logic” above shouldn’t mean squat to you, who is looking for a way to drive their Indy comic into the ground- go ahead and plan your 600 character Mega-event super jam packed 24 issue extravaganza! Don’t worry about finishing what you start! Aim to do today what it took the big boys 40 years to build up to! Who needs closure? Forget about that and open a new box of Ding Dongs!

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